This Is Not About Shoes

Bodice Check
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I had a dream, years ago, that I still call The Green Dress Dream, that shook me out of my sleep and was neither happy nor scary nor sad altogether, but was and remains the most distinct dream I’ve ever had, full of blazing Technicolor and exacting detail.

It was long and a ramble, as dreams often are, but the part that mattered was the part where I charged into the ocean in the dress.

We were under attack on some tiny tropical island, a futuristic Pearl Harbor full of strange, sci-fi movie weapons and screaming and smoke but strangely, no blood. The enemy wanted complete annihilation but they came for something specific too: my husband. They thought he was a spy, or had valuable secrets to share, and when he was hauled down the beach by enemy soldiers and dragged into the ocean toward a bobbing rowboat, I followed. I ran down the beach and into the water after him wearing what was maybe the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen.

In my awake life, I’ve never seen this dress anywhere, not on a rack or a runway or a red carpet. (I had never seen the man who was my husband—fair-haired with Marboro Man resolve—in any of those places either.) That I remember the dress so specifically is either a function of its symbolic significance in my psyche or my complete raging insanity. It was boldly one-shouldered, a green silk chiffon that crisscrossed across the bodice and tangled its way to the floor, like Winged Victory meets Alexander McQueen. It was something you’d wear to the Golden Globes, not the apocalypse, but the presence of such a beautiful thing, a jewel against the dismal sky, changed the whole timbre of the dream from horrific to prophetic.

There was, of course, an embrace in the raging surf and sobbing before the soldiers pried him out of my arms. Then, though, as they dumped him into the boat, I suddenly shouted, “You can’t! I’m pregnant!” This news seemed to shock no one but me, as though I hadn’t known it until the words came out of my mouth.

Now, alas, we had a tragedy on our hands. Although I will admit that I looked fantastic, even in delicate condition.

Yesterday, on an outing to buy a suitcase, I found that dress on a sale rack at a Union Square department store, and I bought it. It was not inexpensive, even on sale. It was not even precisely the same dress, but I knew something was up, some strange emotional memory gurgling to the surface, when I started to cry in the fitting room. I did not make the connection to the dream, in fact, until I tried it on at home and, looking at myself in the mirror, got a woozy sense of déjà vu. I even said to a friend without thinking, “I have no place to wear this, save maybe my own wedding.”

It is a pale green silk chiffon Alberta Ferretti gown that, yes, crisscrosses across the bodice. It is not one-shouldered, but it evokes the same feeling as the dress in the dream, its goddess-y magic.

I have found many exciting, bargain-priced pieces in this city and this one held that same kind of thrill, but this dress felt especially important. Like finding the piece of a puzzle. And maybe too, that’s why I like certain pieces in the first place—a color, a texture, the turn of a sleeve. Maybe they are all scraps of memory from somewhere, a sparkling thing that held my rapt attention at two-years old, a pair of my mother’s corduroys, the smell of the boy I crushed on in high school, or something unreal—a private fiction—that only came once, in a dream.

Tres Chic ou Tres Cheap?

Little Black Pump
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I am moving to Paris in 10 days and for the duration of my stay there — a treacherous-seeming four months — I will not purchase a single pair of shoes. Blame the small matter of unemployment or the even smaller one of my already-crammed suitcases. This in the most fashionable city in earth, a place where women actually follow the no-carry-and-switch rule in favor of good old fashioned discomfort, where heel caps don't stand a chance on the cobbles in Montmatre.

I have no idea what I will do, or how I will resist, but I fear being shod American-style in Payless and Chuck Taylors, like every good little eighteen-year-old etudiente.

This should prove interesting.

Cheers, Mate

Canvas the Joint
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I’m going to London in nine days, and given that circumstance, I decide that I desperately need new vacation-style walking shoes to transverse those dirty city streets. That I transverse the dirty city streets of New York every single day of my life in all manner of shoe — inappropriate and not, painful and otherwise — seems somehow irrelevant to this situation. I become fixated. I set high retail expectations. These shoes must:

• Have real structure without being sneakers
  
• Be flat
  
• Assume some semblance of comfort
  
• Be slip-on, for airport security
  
• Be waterproofable, for the inevitable London weather
  
• Be cute, for my sanity
  

Fueling these criteria are a number of factors ranging from my general foibles to my shockingly flat feet. How flat? Let’s just say that you can’t get a needle between me and the floor. This has destroyed the continuity of many a glittering city night for me while I carry, change, and carry, change again from the subway, to the cab, to the party, and back. It’s really quite lame. But it’s what I deal with, and I want no such interruption on my vacation.

So I shop. I do so with the understanding that these criteria severely limit my choices, and that shoes fitting them often straddle the dress/casual line in totally horrifying ways. Yes, we’ve all seen those Mary Janes with the Goodyear soles. Mostly, though, my fantasy shoe is low, casual, and doesn’t instantly brand me as TOURIST in blaring letters. After all, our day trip is in Paris. I take the subway to 34th St. anyway, feeling hopeful.

Shopping at 34th St. on a sunny spring Saturday is a free-for-all, a bass-thumping, whining, messy smash-and-grab full of tourists and harried salespeople and tipped-over displays. The Aldo store swarms with women, half indecisive, half limping around on one stiletto heel or one platform boot.

Fitting my ironclad criteria in a roudabout sort of way are a pair of canvas slip-ons with a sweet little heart print on them. They are — I will concede — silly, and don’t quite spell understated European refinement, but something about them is appealing in a late-eighties-shopping-mall kind of way.

When I ask, the sales associate will simply not give me the other shoe to try on. In fact, he will not get me any shoes at all from the back room. He tells me to try on the display shoe, which is a full size off. (“Those shoes run really strange anyway,” he tells me.) If it fits, he’ll get me the mate and bring it behind the counter so I can buy the pair. I ask again, just to make sure that I have heard correctly, and I have: I am discouraged from trying on both shoes at the same time before purchase. I am pressed for time and because of it, this strikes me as something other than ludicrous. I listen to the guy. Even worse, I buy the shoes.

Is it any surprise at all then, that upon removing them from the box and sliding them on my feet, that they don’t fit? They are gigantic. Nothing, not even Dr. Scholl’s Massaging Gel Soles, will fix it.

I return them at another Aldo store downtown, away from the tourists, with my brain switched on. When I try on this time, I insist on putting both shoes on my feet at the same time. And the consolation prize isn’t a bad one. In the time since I bought the first pair, there’s a new shipment of canvas shoes. They are not quite refined or stylish, but they’re comfortable and whimsical. I buy them, along with an $8 can of waterproofing spray. I am ready to globetrot. I will match the phone booths.

Of Shoes Lost and Found

Is That Aubergine?
Originally uploaded by Laura.

My favorite shoes are a pair of deep purple Sonia Rykiel pumps with a T-bar strap and a toe that is a mesmerizing hybrid of pointed and round. They had been abandoned on the discount rack of a department store, unglamorously bound with an elastic. It was one of those in-the-store moments where my heart rate changed a little, where I thought Something must be wrong.

Truthfully, I have no gripping affinity for Sonia. To my mind, her clothes conjure images of aged socialites in the eighties and endless sweaters. But these shoes. It was maybe their delightful color (subtle, almost metallic), or their obvious workmanship (again, the lines of that wonderful toe) but this one time, and for that price, I could make an exception and welcome her into my life.

At 8:30 pm last evening, I left those shoes, wrapped in a plastic Associated Supermarket bag, under a chair in a burger joint in Park Slope. Also in the bag were two plastic lunch containers — empty — and a pair of somewhat less-beloved, but certainly no less valuable Givenchy flats. If you consider the retail value alone, this is more or less like leaving your iPod on a table in the food court of Penn Station.

My boyfriend, reasonable as ever, tried to talk me down from my immediate panic when I realized, three hours and 15 blocks later, that I was a bag short. "First of all, any would-be thief would have to be your size. Second of all, (s)he probably wouldn't even know what (s)he was looking at."

Except this is New York, and this is a place where thieves — maybe especially thieves — know their Givenchy when they see it. We ran to the burger place, strutting through the cold, and for an instant, I tried to jump-start the mourning process in my mind. I convinced myself that they were lost forever, that they were already halfway posted on eBay or pawned somewhere on the Slope. And then, an instant later, I convinced myself that it didn't matter. They're shoes, after all. There is enough Sonia Rykiel in the world to go around more than once.

When we arrived, the burger joint was closed by the bar was open. A bus boy smiled when he saw me and handed me the bag, which he'd been keeping on the counter. He had tied a knot in the top, to make sure nothing slipped out.

Reality Check for the Working Girl

The Comfort-Worn Favorite
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I am one of those girls who carries her shoes to work. Fashionistas will tell you not to do this, that it's unprofessional to sit at your desk peeling your socks off and bearing your fuzz-covered toes but I don't really care. For me, it's a matter of protecting my shoes, not my feet, although I can certainly traverse Brooklyn's waterfront cobblestones a lot more easily in Keds than in my favorite pumps.

Last week, I was called on my fashion faux pas on West 3rd Street by a complete stranger. I was wearing a pair of very green Chuck Taylors that bear a very distinctive hole in each pinky toe. Looking back, these aren't exactly street-ready. Or light-of-day ready. But I love them like family and wore them with — I know — a red dress with the intention of changing at the office. A white coat served as the great neutralizer and prevented any Christmas tree comparisons.

I was halfway up the block when a homeless man rolled by me in his wheelchair. He asked me for change and then looked down and saw them. He said, "Whooo, look at those!" His tone did not strike me as complementary.

He had no legs.

Home Fashion

Rainbow Bright
Originally uploaded by Laura.

I go home to my mother’s house in Massachusetts with a bag of dirty clothes. She confiscates it, begins untangling tights and socks, and says, “This isn’t bad. Your sister brings three times as much, usually.”

She throws it all into our washing machine, which is the size of a small Volvo, and leaves me with nothing to wear for the rest of the weekend. I open up a closet in what was my bedroom. My mother has painted it, moved her books onto the shelves. It is her office now in mauve and red with her sleek new computer set up against one wall, like a spruce-up show on TLC. My clothes, the ones that didn’t fit into my suitcase when I moved to New York City, have been relegated to a single garment bag on one side of the closet. Nothing fits me anymore except a pair of jeans with a broken zipper.

“Go in Stefanie’s room,” she says. “She left an entire wardrobe behind and still had enough clothes to take a full one with her.”

My sister moved west to the Berkshires last autumn. If you open up her armoire, you’d never know it. She left behind stacks of sweaters, yoga pants, a full rack of shoes. A sweater catches my eye. It is bulky-knit in rainbow colors, like something you’d wear to milk the cows but which probably came from Urban Outfitters. It is the kind of thing I would never wear in New York.

The jeans with the broken zipper are bootcut, which, per my latest issue of Vogue, are so two years ago that they’re almost back in style. I arrange the zipper so it stays put and realize — the bliss of concrete comparison — that I was born for bootcut. Slim leg jeans are a nightmare for girls with hips. So we compromise. We get the ones at Old Navy that are cut for real women, but they don’t look right. They will never camouflage the reality that we are not Gemma Ward, that we like ice cream, that everyday life rolls in curves and not in straight lines.

I wear the jeans and the rainbow sweater and have nothing to put on my feet until I inspect Stefanie’s abandoned shoe rack and see them. They are amazing. They are the ugliest pair of shoes I have ever seen. They are not sneakers, per say, but they aren’t obviously anything else either. They have laces. And they are pink and green paisley with silver metallic toes. They are what you would wear to a disco on the moon. They have big, blessed rubber soul.

I wear them all weekend. I wear everything all weekend, the sweater, the jeans with the broken zipper, and my sister’s paisley George Clinton shoes. The only people who see me are members of my own family. Away from the city, I watch TV, I raid the fridge, I eat my grandmother’s lentils and pasta. I am someone else. I am the rainbow connection.

The Late-Night Cast-Offs

Shoe Porn
Originally uploaded by Laura.

How many pairs of shoes does it take to get to the center of my addled fashion conscience? Six, apparently.

Heels dress up even my most feeble attempts at winter fashion, but last night at 9:58 on my way to a friend’s birthday party, I couldn’t commit to any of these, or the small pile of outfits that went with them. In the end I wore brown boots — unglamorous workhorses that they are — and walked over to the Lower East Side rather than splurge for a cab. When it’s below zero in Manhattan, for me, substance beats style’s skinny ass every time.